Thanks for your suggestion. This restored wireless capability but the problem persists the same as before. I'm going to have a look at the link in the other comment and get some hardware details for you guys in a sec.
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MeghJan 3 '13 at 16:20

I just can't sift through 14k+ lines to try to decipher what's wrong. How about a pastebin of: cat /var/log/syslog | grep etwork | tail -n30 taken just after you tried and failed to connect. dmesg doesn't show anything wrong for iwlwifi or its dependencies which is why I'd like to turn to Network Manager. Is your router set to WPA and WPA2 mixed mode? Many drivers prefer WPA2 only and not mixed mode.
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chili555Jan 3 '13 at 16:54